Infinite Dreams (12 page)

He supposed that a technician—maybe even Verden himself—might be bribed, but the money he had gotten for his piano was inaccessible and probably not enough anyhow.

Best to just stick it out.

Leonard is in an unfamiliar uniform, seated at a complicated console. He sits in front of a wall-sized backlit map of the world; North America and Europe covered with blue dots and Asia covered with red dots. Central to the console is a prominent keyhole, and a matching key dangles lightly on a chain around his neck. His left side is weighed down by a heavy pistol in a shoulder holster. A plate on the console winks every thirty seconds: NO GO. There is an identical
console to his right, with another man identically accoutered, who is apparently quite absorbed in reading a book.

So they are the two men who will set in motion the vengeance of the Free World in case of enemy attack. Or adverse executive decision.

The plate blinks GO, in red, stroboscopically. A teletype behind them starts to chatter.

The other man takes his key and hesitates, looks at Leonard. Says a simple word.

Which is the wrong way to act? Leonard wonders. If he shoots the man, he saves half the world. If they both insert their keys, the enemies of democracy die. But maybe by the logic of the dream they are supposed to die.

Leonard takes the key from his neck and puts it in the hole, turns it counterclockwise. The other does the same. The plate stops flashing.

Leonard unholsters his pistol and shoots the other man in the chest, then in the head. Then, fading, he shoots himself, for good measure.

Then there are four dreams offering less and less clear-cut alternatives.

Finally, Leonard is sitting alone in front of a fireplace, reading a book. He reads twenty pages, about Toltec influence on Mayan sculpture, while nothing happens.

He decides not to read for a while and stares into the fire. Still nothing happens. He strips pages from the book and burns them. He burns the dust-jacket and the end boards. Nothing.

He sits down, unstraps one leg and throws it into the fire. The prosthetic foot follows. He watches them melt without burning.

After a couple of hours he falls asleep.

Dr. Verden did not come to him after this session was over. He woke up, the nurse gave him a hypnotic, he woke up again later. Then he spent a day leafing through magazines, watching the cube, wondering.

Was Verden trying to trick him in some way? Or did the ambiguity of the dreams mean that the therapy was succeeding? The nurse didn’t know anything, or just wasn’t talking.

As far as he could test himself, Leonard didn’t feel any differently. He was still full of rage at Scottie and Verden, still quite willing to sell his mathematics when money got low—and didn’t regret having sold the piano—still felt that imprinting a person who was manifestly sane was a gross violation of privacy and civil rights.

Leonard has another session, of seven dreams. In the first three the result of his action is ambiguous. In the next two, it is trivial. In the sixth it is obscure. In the seventh, Leonard is a catatonic lying motionless, for a long time, in a hospital ward full of motionless catatonics.

This time Verden appeared without white smock or clipboard. Leonard was surprised that seeing him in a plain business suit, stripped of symbols of authority, should make such a difference. He decided that it was a conscious masquerade.

“The last two sessions have been very alarming,” Verden said, rocking on his heels, hands behind his back.

“Boring, at any rate.”

“I’ll be frank with you.” Leonard reflected that that was one of the least trust-inspiring phrases in the language. Surely the doctor knew that. In trying to figure out why he’d said it, Leonard almost missed the frankness.

“What?”

“Please pay attention. This is very important. I said
you are in grave danger of permanently harming your own mind.”

“By resisting your efforts.”

“By resisting therapy too … successfully, if you want to put it that way. It’s a rare syndrome and I didn’t recognize it, but one of the monitors—”

“He had a patient just like me, back in ’93.”

“No. He recalled a journal article.” Verden took a folded sheaf of paper out of an inside pocket, handed it to Leonard. “Read this and tell me it doesn’t describe what’s happening to you.”

It looked very convincing, a ’stat of an article from the July 2017 number of
The American Journal of Behavior Modification Techniques
. The title of the article was “The Paranoid Looping Defense: a Cybernetic Analogue.” It was full of jargon, charts and the kind of vague mathematics that social scientists admire.

Leonard handed it back. “This and two hundred bucks will get you the services of a typesetter, Doctor. Nice try.”

“You think …” He shook his head slowly, ran his finger along the paper’s crease and returned it to his pocket. “Of course you think that I’m lying to you.” He smiled. “That’s consistent with the syndrome.”

He took the paper out again and set it on the table next to Leonard’s bed. “You may want to read this, if only for amusement.” Leaving, standing theatrically in the door: “You may as well know that there will be an extra monitor for your therapy tomorrow. A representative of the Florida Medical Ethics Board. He will give me permission to accelerate your treatment with drugs.”

“Then I’ll try to be very cooperative tomorrow.” He smiled at the doctor’s back and then laughed. He had expected something like this. But he was surprised that Verden hadn’t been more subtle.

“You can’t kid a kidder,” he said aloud, folding the
paper into fourths, eighths, sixteenths. He tossed it into the bedpan and turned on the cube.

It was the first time he’d ever enjoyed watching a quiz show.

As Leonard goes under the anesthesia he is very happy. He has a plan.

He will cooperate with the doctor, choose all the right alternatives, allow himself to be cured. But only temporarily.

Once released, he will go to a skills transfer agency and hock his mathematics. He will bring the money to Verden, who has his original personality on file—
and buy himself back!
Audacious!

He awaits the first dream situation with smug composure.

Leonard is going under the anesthesia, very happy because he has a plan. He will cooperate with the doctor, choose all the right alternatives and allow himself to be cured, but only temporarily. Once released he will hock his mathematics at a skills transfer agency and bring the money to Verden, who has his original personality on file and
buy
himself back! Audaciously and with smug composure he awaits the first dream.

Happily going under because he has a plan to be cured temporarily and sell his mathematics to get money to
buy himself back
from Verden, Leonard waits to dream.

Happy under plan cure
himself
dream.

This is a lark of a story, that I wrote to entertain myself after finishing a novel. The fact that you can always sell humorous science fiction had nothing to do with it.

I like the local-color humorists of the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries, and it occurred to me that I’d never seen a science fiction local-color story. Perhaps because it’s basically a silly idea. At any rate, I was stuck in another damned Iowa winter, feeling homesick for Florida, and so I wrote this.

Sent a copy of it to a friend who is a sensitive poet with many degrees and an accent you could slice and serve up with red-eye gravy, asking him whether the dialect rang true. He wrote back that he thought my family must have had a Southerner in the woodpile. Whether that’s a yes, or no, or a sometimes, I’m not sure.

New Homestead, Florida: 1990.

John Taylor Taylor, retired professor of mathematics, lived just over two kilometers out of town, in a three-room efficiency module tucked in an isolated corner of a citrus grove. Books and old furniture and no neighbors, which was the way John liked it. He only had a few years left on this Earth, and he preferred to spend them with his oldest and most valued friend: himself.

But this story isn’t about John Taylor Taylor. It’s about his moonshiner, Lester Gilbert. And some five billion others.

This day the weather was fine, so the professor took his stick and walked into town to pick up the week’s mail. A thick cylinder of journals and letters was wedged into his box; he had to ask the clerk to remove them from the other side. He tucked the mail under his arm without looking at it, and wandered next door to the bar.

“Howdy, Professor.”

“Good afternoon, Leroy.” He and the bartender were the only ones in the place, not unusual this late in the month. “I’ll take a boilermaker today, please.” He threaded
his way through a maze of flypaper strips and eased himself into a booth of chipped, weathered plastic.

He sorted his mail into four piles: junk, bills, letters, and journals. Quite a bit of junk, two bills, a letter that turned out to be another bill, and three journals—
Nature, Communications
of the American Society of Mathematics, and a collection of papers delivered at an ASM symposium on topology. He scanned the contributors lists and, as usual, saw none of his old colleagues represented.

“Here y’go.” Leroy sat a cold beer and a shot glass of whiskey between
Communications
and the phone bill. John paid him with a five and lit his pipe carefully before taking a sip. He folded
Nature
back at the letters column and began reading.

The screen door slapped shut loudly behind a burly man in wrinkled clean work clothes. John recognized him with a nod; he returned a left-handed V-sign and mounted a bar stool.

“How ’bout a red-eye, Leroy?” Mixture of beer and tomato juice with a dash of Louisiana, hangover cure.

Leroy mixed it. “Rough night, Isaac?”

“Shoo. You don’ know.” He downed half the concoction in a gulp, and shuddered. He turned to John. “Hey, Professor. What you know about them flyin’ saucers?”

“Lot of them around a few years ago,” he said tactfully. “Never saw one myself.”

“Me neither. Wouldn’t give you a nickel for one. Not until last night.” He slurped the red-eye and wiped his mouth.

“What,” the bartender said, “you saw one?”

“Saw
one. Shoo.” He slid the two-thirds empty glass across the bar. “You wanta put some beer on top that? Thanks.

“We was down the country road seven-eight klicks. You know Eric Olsen’s new place?”

“Don’t think so.”

“New boy, took over Jarmin’s plat.”

“Oh yeah. Never comes in here; know of him, though.”

“You wouldn’t hang around no bar neither if you had a pretty little … well. Point is, he was puttin’ up one of them new stasis barns, you know?”

“Yeah, no bugs. Keeps stuff forever, my daddy-in-law has one.”

“Well, he picked up one big enough for his whole avocado crop. Hold on to it till the price is right, up north, like January? No profit till next year, help his ’mortization.”

“Yeah, but what’s that got to do with the flying—”

“I’m gettin’ to it.” John settled back to listen. Some tall tale was on the way.

“Anyhow, we was gonna have an old-fashion barn raisin’… Miz Olsen got a boar and set up a pit barbecue, the other ladies they brought the trimmin’s. Eric, he made two big washtubs of spiced wine, set ’em on ice till we get the barn up. Five, six hours, it turned out (the directions wasn’t right),
hot
afternoon, and we just headed for that wine like you never saw.

“I guess we was all pretty loaded, finished off that wine before the pig was ready. Eric, he called in to Samson’s and had ’em send out two kegs of Bud.”

“Got to get to know that boy,” Leroy said.

“Tell me about it. Well, we tore into that pig and had him down to bones an’ gristle in twenty minutes. Best god-dern pig
I
ever had, anyhow.

“So’s not to let the fire permit go to waste, we went out an’ rounded up a bunch of scrap, couple of good-size logs. Finish off that beer around a bonfire. Jommy Parker
went off to pick up his fiddle and he took along Midnight Jackson, pick up his banjo. Miz Olsen had this Swedish guitar, one too many strings but by God could she play it.

“We cracked that second keg ’bout sundown and Lester Gilbert—you know Lester?”

Leroy laughed. “Don’t I just. He was ’fraid the beer wouldn’t hold out, went to get some corn?”

John made a mental note to be home by four o’clock. It was Wednesday; Lester would be by with his weekly quart.

“We get along all right,” the bartender was saying. “Figure our clientele don’t overlap that much.”

“Shoo,” Isaac said. “Some of Lester’s clientele overlaps on a regular basis.

“Anyhow, it got dark quick, you know how clear it was last night. Say, let me have another, just beer.”

Leroy filled the glass and cut the foam off. “Clear enough to see a flyin’ saucer, eh?”

“I’m gettin’ to it. Thanks.” He sipped it and concentrated for a few seconds on tapping tobacco into a cigarette paper. “Like I say, it got dark fast. We was sittin’ around the fire, singin’ if we knew the words, drinkin’ if we didn’t—”

“’Spect you didn’t know many of the songs, yourself.”

“Never could keep the words in my head. Anyhow, the fire was gettin’ a mite hot on me, so I turned this deck chair around and settled down lookin’ east, fire to my back, watchin’ the moon rise over the government forest there—”

“Hold on now. Moon ain’t comin’ up until after midnight.”

“You-God-Damn-
right
it ain’t!” John felt a chill even though he’d seen it coming. Isaac had a certain fame as a storyteller. “That wan’t
nobody’s
moon.”

“Did anybody else see it?” John asked.

“Ev’rybody. Ev’rybody who was there—and one that wasn’t. I’ll get to that.

“I saw that thing and spilled my beer gettin’ up, damn near trip and fall in the pit. Hollered ‘Lookit that goddamn thing!’ and pointed, jumpin’ up an’ down, and like I say, they all did see it.

“It was a little bigger than the moon and not quite so round, egg-shaped. Whiter than the moon, an’ if you looked close you could see little green and blue flashes around the edge. It didn’t make no noise we could hear, and was movin’ real slow. We saw it for at least a minute. Then it went down behind the trees.”